Session

Perl 5.8.x marches on, stable, reliable, and boring as ever. Just what you
need for a production environment. Hear Nicholas Clark, the maintenance
pumpking, talk about the process behind "release early release often" which
brings you the regular, reliable Perl maintenance releases. Learn about our
near-miss nightmares, and how you can evade the the traps that nearly caught
us. He'll describe what we do behind the scenes to keep life quiet for you,
and how you might apply this yourself to improve your software.

Meanwhile there's a change of face for Perl 5.9.x, where Rafael Garcia-Suarez
has taken over from Hugo van der Sanden as the development pumpking. He'll
report on the state of 5.9, as we work towards the release of Perl 5.10. How
could one improve on Perl 5.8? Well, let him whet your appetite for the next
major version of Perl 5 with explanation of the exciting new features and how
they will benefit your development. For example, user definable lexical
pragmas to give you flexibility in your code, and relocatable Perl binaries to
give you flexibility in your distribution. Ponder the savings in debugging as
he demonstrates how Perl 5.9 can already do the "impossible," with the infamous
"use of uninitialized value" warning augmented with the name the offending
variable. Perl 5.10 will be good for you--come to this talk to learn why.